"Back home in San Francisco after a year in Dublin, engineer and Irish fiddler, Niall Sweeney is the target of a vicious bar-room assault at the hands of a near-stranger. But Sweeney's troubles really begin when he trips over the slashed body of his attacker. Baffled, he is abruptly fired, then linked by the police to a complex IRA banking scam and deadly bombing. Working with his wife Rose, a brilliant literature professor, Sweeney tries to keep one step ahead of the police while searching desperately for the truth. While Sweeney hunts among the bar musicians for the murderer, Rose launches off in another direction, convinced that the secret can be found in the murdered man's obsession with a thousand-year-old Irish poem--The Legend of Mad Sweeney. By the time the couple stumbles upon the bizarre truth, they must fight for their lives and prevent the ruin of several innocent people by giving the police a solution to the murder that is as believable as it is completely wrong."--Page 4 of cover.